Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to maintaining up to date allocated shared resources and more particularly to selecting an optimal time for applying pending patches and updates to virtual machines, software and hardware satisfying resource sharing requests with minimal delay and disruption in infrastructure, and in application and business processes.
Background Description
Acquiring, managing and maintaining Information Technology (IT) is a major budgetary concern for any modern organization. Moreover, since organizations seldom use local physical hardware (e.g., mainframe servers) at full capacity, frequently, some capacity is wasted. To reduce IT infrastructure and applications costs and waste, instead of acquiring physical hardware, organizations are increasingly consolidating workload on shared hardware, using virtual machines (VMs) hosted on provider servers or computers.
Ideally, each VM appears as an independent computer (e.g., a virtual processor, memory and disk space) running, for example, an operating system (OS) and a software stack with one or more active software elements (e.g., applications or other software). As with any state of the art computer system, virtual machines require periodic and aperiodic incident fixes, including hardware and software updates and patches effected in what are known as interventions. Thus, a typical intervention may fix hardware, patch bugs and security weaknesses, patch software features and/or effect environment changes that may be of critical importance.
Worldwide enterprises, such as the stock exchange and multinational banks, increasingly use VMs in reliance on cloud based applications, such as business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) applications. These enterprises use typical B2B and B2C applications including, for example, for banking transactions, payment solutions, logistics, maintaining Internet based stores, and managing factory automated processes. A mistimed intervention, however, can be costly to provisioned for B2B or B2C applications, directly affecting client business revenues and diminishing the provider's reputation. Consequently, provider IT system planning and management have given priority to selecting an intervention time either to minimize the impact of applying interventions, or to prioritizing applying interventions tightly scheduled in consideration of client needs.
Previously, in scheduling these interventions IT system planning and management support have relied on isolated impact analysis. IT support evaluated how interventions impacted individual infrastructure elements and applications to make educated guesses of how businesses are impacted, e.g., based on experience gathered from experts and customer feedback. Using the evaluation results, IT support can predict the breadth and depth of the effects on an organization from intervention modifications, especially in the context of service management. Unfortunately, however, there is a dearth of end-to-end knowledge for complex systems and deployed applications. Moreover, configuration information may be incomplete or stale. This has made it difficult to assess overall intervention impact, and to evaluate system failure impacts from the customer's point of view. Consequently, organizations infrequently select the optimal time to apply interventions, and frequently select less than optimum times, unnecessarily and significantly impact business customers.
Thus, there is a need for determining the time to apply interventions to IT system resources to minimize potential system impact, and more particularly, there is a need for considering all shared resource elements that may be affected by an intervention in determining the optimum time to apply the intervention for minimized impact on system clients.